NPPF - Nabokov & Time

[David Morris]

http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter19.txt

We can imagine all kinds of  time,  such  as  for  example
"applied  time"--  time  applied to events, which we measure by
means of clocks and calendars; but  those  types  of  time  are
inevitably  tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession,
stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the  "passage
of  time,"  we  visualize  an  abstract river flowing through a
generalized landscape. Applied time,  measurable  illusions  of
time,  are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists,
they do not interest me, and they did not interest my  creature
Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada. 
     He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of
Time,  not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being
"an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration," of being able  to
delight  sensually  in  the  texture of time, "in its stuff and
spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability  of
its  grayish  gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." He also
is aware that "Time is  a  fluid  medium  for  the  culture  of
metaphors."
     Time,  though  akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which
would imply motion-- and Time does  not  move.  Van's  greatest
discovery  is  his perception of Time as the dim hollow between
two  rhythmic  beats,  the  narrow   and   bottomless   silence
between  the beats, not the beats themselves, which only
embar Time. In this sense human life is not a  pulsating  heart
but the missed heartbeat.


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